Month: May 2014

The thought of it is more pleasurable than the real thing itself: We do things that generate memories, and keep telling ourselves our favourites enshrining them in our identity; the things that happen to us become a part of us. Why we do things is to generate good things to think about; while negating the ones that are bad. Reminecsing, rumination, is arguably the most consuming and satisfying act we humans do. It’s the most talked about thing at least: what’s happened to us. From banal to the best we talk, and forever talked about every aspect of our own lives we’ve been conscious of. Really, we do pleasurable things so we can think about them – as we are apes, we then have to chat shit about them.

We anticipate beforehand; what it might be like, how we’ll go about it, what could happen, our and other people’s reactions, secretly how can we benefit? And afterwards, we reminecse; playing over what happened, what other people saw, how we held ourselves, ruing missed opportunities, savouring those tiny gains. We do this with all memories, near and distant, savouring in some way each one, while our future is what we live for. Just one more memory… it’s a hard habit to break…

We live double lives: the one in our minds, and that person who appears on video camera. Many would deny legitimacy of a transcript of their lives. That’s not me, that’s not really how I am? Did I say that? Charles Dickens captured this perfectly in A Christmas Carol, that’s why it’s been so enduring, everyone knows what it’s like to not recognise themselves! But we’re preoccupied with not thinking about anything, when we speak we summon this voice and it says words for us, you say this and your blithely unaware your humuncleous, that internal monologue, is meant to be used for thinking before speaking too not just reminecsing…

Our actions attempt to satiate our thirst to convert memories into good ones because there are many aspects of society that manufacture the bad. Tolerating our own reflection is strenuous enough. We are always building towards something in our minds because it enacts progress as we can’t bear the idea of inevitable change, so it has to be change for the better. For this we deploy our memories as experience, facilitating the refinement of our pleasurale actions which in turn develop our day-to-day habits making it all bearable.

The best drugs are pleasure and desire as they create thought that dissipates the negative.

The above LP is by Tim Hecker, titled Ravedeath, 1972, quite surprised how listenable it is after that first track. Be intrepid and step into this murky ambient pool.